Bloomerang vs Blackbaud CRM

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Our analysts compared Bloomerang vs Blackbaud CRM based on data from our 400+ point analysis of Nonprofit CRM Software, user reviews and our own crowdsourced data from our free software selection platform.

Blackbaud CRM Software Tool

Product Basics

Bloomerang is a complete system allowing nonprofit organizations to manage donor relationships, events and fundraising. Its emphasis on donor engagement and retention supports company growth.

Capabilities include email marketing, online giving, grant tracking, donor surveys, data segmentation, dashboards, reporting and prospect research. Deployment via Amazon Cloud Services provides security and scalability. It’s available to both U.S. and Canadian organizations.
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Built on Microsoft Azure, Blackbaud CRM is a fundraising and relationship management solution, catering to enterprise-level marketing and fundraising needs. It helps streamline data and reporting processes, offering insights into every stage of the constituent lifecycle and increasing operational efficiency.

Capabilities include financial aid management, tuition management, advocacy, fund accounting, grant making, award management, direct marketing, data enrichment and more. It helps attract new supporters, facilitate communications according to unique preferences and grow mission impact.
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Product Insights

  • Features Designed Using Expert Input: Bloomerang partners with fundraising experts to ensure high quality for essential features such as donor engagement surveys, data analysis, written donor communication, social media and email. 
  • Commitment to Donor Retention: Product features and enhancements aim at retaining donors for sustainable growth. Accomplish this through analytics and dashboards, an engagement meter, an interactive timeline, trend reports, regular data updates (NCOA, birth year, etc.), standard reports and affinity scorecards. 
  • Improved Giving Results: Find the best donors through a giving summary. The summary leverages a proprietary algorithm designed by Dr. Adrian Sargeant, a fundraising expert, along with a generosity score, both of which use a rating scale to highlight the strongest supporters. 
  • Sustainability Scorecard: Encourage grant funding by helping the organization become responsible and sustainable so supporters feel confident giving. The scorecard is a quarterly survey that evaluates the organization’s health and promotes strategies that lead to sustainability. 
  • Donor Insights: Evaluate prospect’s giving capacity, create engagement strategies and pinpoint the best asking amounts by integrating with the DonorSearch platform. Generate wealth reports drawn from more than 20 proprietary and public databases. 
  • Mobile-Responsive Design: Get full access to information outside the office and be confident that website pages, like donation forms, are formatted correctly. 
  • Flexible Configurations: Customized settings enable recording relevant information, with custom fields and household fields to capture multiple phone numbers, emails and addresses. 
  • Ahern Audit: Ensure emails and letters focus on the donor and are easily readable. The tools draw from best practices developed by donor communications expert Tom Ahern. 
  • Consultant Directory: Receive additional expert support and access to more tools through Bloomerang’s extensive network of agencies, consultants and software vendors. 
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  • Effective Fundraising: Users can handle fundraising programs efficiently by coordinating and streamlining multiple fundraising teams, and defining solicitation and stewardship responsibilities. It’s also possible to unite multidimensional relationships across different chapters, programs and field offices using scalable and intuitive solutions, and track progress using KPIs. Users can review trends, identify areas of opportunity, and develop strategies to improve performance. Fundraisers can also access or update important constituent information using mobile devices. 
  • Enhanced Communication: An integrated approach helps users understand and control multifaceted communication efforts. This lets them leverage data across multiple campaigns and drive higher outcomes. Team members can access required information using workflows, dashboards and communication tools that offer actionable insights. 
  • Strong Campaigning: It’s possible to strengthen direct mail programs by integrating marketing campaigns with constituent information. Users can identify high-performing donor segments, set budgets and gauge performance results in real time. 
  • Online Presence: A completely customizable CMS helps create a robust website that acts as a hub of activities and a platform to interact through forums, social networking and personal pages. 
  • Maximized Lifetime Donor Value: Users can increase the lifetime value of donors and replenish their donor pool by leveraging a nonprofit cooperative database. This helps them retain current donors, encourage lapsed donors to be active again and acquire new donors. 
  • Customized Solution: The customizable CRM platform lets users offer unique experiences and address different situations based on varied constituent needs. 
  • Managed Opportunities: Benchmarking tools help users identify opportunities and challenges so that they can manage those efficiently. They can also evaluate and evolve past strategies, compare performance, and share information across the organization to streamline operations. 
  • Customized Advocacy Solutions: Users can create a strong identity by optimizing and executing strategies. Integration with fundraising and marketing solutions helps users reach important prospects, influence decision makers, convert advocates into sustained donors and run effective cross-channel campaigns. 
  • Managed CSR Programs: Blackbaud CRM helps improve local community relationships, attract new talent and accomplish greater purpose by driving employee engagement, funds and volunteer hours. Using flexible volunteering solutions, employers can express social responsibility interests and passions as well as motivate team members with incentive programs. 
  • Secure Data: Blackbaud CRM follows reliable security measures to protect private financial information, being PCI-DSS level-one compliant. It follows the FTC's Red Flag Rules for preventing identity theft, uses 256-bit encryption through a VPN network for data transmission, and funds deposits in FDIC-insured custodial accounts. The platform offers protection against professional liability, cybersecurity, general insurance and employee theft. 
  • Transparent Grant Making: An integrated and customizable platform ensures maximum impact from grants as well as leverages financial integrations and intuitive workflows. With access to information from all philanthropic stakeholders, users can get a detailed view of outcomes, build strong relationships with them using communication tools, share impact stories and achieve mission goals quickly by reducing approval time. 
  • Data-Driven Solutions: Blackbaud’s target analytics solution lets users save time and improve ROI by optimizing fundraising and comprehending its effectiveness. They can connect with constituents through preferred channels, acquire new donors and advocates, inspire them to join missions, and understand their unique personas. 
  • Expert Consulting Services: Fundraising experts with years of experience in strategy implementation, modeling result analysis, long-term roadmap development and donor portfolio analysis offer consultations. They help identify industry best practices, suggest investment and implementation plans, and recommend tactical, project-level and strategic targeting. 
  • Accurate and Enriched Data: Users can get a holistic view of the database with updated information so they can understand how to connect with prospects, eliminating time and energy waste. The toolset enables users to acquire email addresses and phone numbers, send emails, identify suitable donors and their employers, and gather demographic information like age and gender. 
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  • Online Giving: Maximizes giving, provides strong security and keeps processing fees low. Integrates customizable with any website, supports multiple campaigns, automatically pulls in data captured in donor forms and is customizable. 
  • Email Marketing: Reach the right constituents with the right content from within the platform — no need to integrate with a third-party application like Constant Contact. Features include a user-friendly editor, mobile-responsive format, scheduling, templates, segmenting filters, analytics, receipts and delivery validation. 
  • Integrations: Connect Bloomerang to best-of-breed solutions that provide wealth screening, data stewardship, fund accounting, social fundraising, donation processing, IT assistance and website packages. However, the integrations aren’t as extensive as competitors such as Donor Perfect and Kindful. 
  • Engagement Meter: Shows how engaged contacts are to facilitate pursuing the best opportunities. Compiles information by measuring things like donation frequency, email opens and clicks, website visits, event attendance, donation amounts and social media interactions. 
  • Social Listening: Assists with effective Twitter engagement by providing a hub for monitoring interactions with an account, choosing hashtags and finding new connections. 
  • Reports: Understand organizational health and donor base with built-in reports that can be used as-is or customized for greater precision. Drag-and-drop tools and filters make reports easy to manage. 
  • Surveys: Encourages long-term relationships with constituents and identifies areas of improvement. The surveys, which focus on existing, lapsed and new donors, are science-based, drawing on the research of Dr. Sargeant. 
  • Grant Tracking: Custom fields, reports, relationship tracking and task management make it easier to secure funding. 
  • Volunteer Management: Simplifies the process of managing volunteers with the ability to record any necessary information as well as keep track of which donors have volunteered and which volunteers have donated. 
  • Data Import: Simplifies uploading of data from a spreadsheet and can retain information like notes and interactions. 
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  • Analytics: Users can nurture lifelong relationships with customers, make informed business decisions and increase revenue with actionable insights into supporters’ behavioral, demographic, lifestyle and financial characteristics. It helps eliminate guesswork from prospect research. 
  • End-to-End Education Management: Blackbaud CRM helps students achieve their academic aspirations by equipping them with the right tools. It offers a host of cloud-based solutions for K–12 private and parochial schools. Features such as online committee review and self-scheduling help save time, while customizable admission checklists let admins and parents review application status. It offers school-specific functionalities such as filterable calendars, dynamic curriculum guides and more. 
  • Peer-to-Peer Fundraising: Blackbaud CRM helps grow a supporter base by discovering new supporters and empowering current ones. Users can engage them in campaigns and events using an optimized peer-to-peer solution portfolio. It helps increase funds and effectiveness using analytics, purpose-built capabilities, coaching and social networking. 
  • Integrated Online Marketing: Integrated solutions let users follow up with customers on a large scale using automated emails driven by behavior or predictive intelligence. They can create a customized, integrated website experience and connect with social influencers to increase social engagement. They can own complete constituent life cycles and synchronize data from marketing, advocacy and fundraising efforts. 
  • Simplified Financial Processes: Financial aid helps expand reach, receive award recommendations through reports and configure calculation settings. Users can collect priority information, design formulas based on enrollment parameters and policies, and submit timely applications and documentation. It saves a great amount of time on the review and verification process. 
  • Tuition Billing: Automated payment processes and dedicated customer support ensure a quick and seamless billing experience. Online account review and payment submission are available on different devices. Flexible payment options include credit card, automatic debit, check or money order, and cash payments. 
  • Streamlined Finance Management: This lets users maintain FASB compliance by tracking expense reports and governing user-specific access rights and approval controls. They can maintain clean account structure, manage reporting requirements and demonstrate stewardship of contributed funds by capturing program, grant and department information. 
  • Integrated Merchant Services: This feature improves efficiency using detailed reporting, 24/7 access to transaction information, pre-reconciled bank deposits and automatic updates of payment data. Users can mitigate fraud and protect sensitive organizational data by simplifying PCI compliance and leveraging Point-to-Point Encryption (P2PE). 
  • Academic Role-Specific Capabilities: The solution supports assignments, grading, announcements, forums and more. It streamlines scheduling, attendance, report cards, grading and transcripts by collecting academic information. Parents can complete admission applications, accept enrollment contracts, monitor homework assignments and more. 
  • Effective Expense Management:  A secure online portal offers insights into vendor spend, allowing users to negotiate better rates. Users can leverage this to add cardholders, review activity with detailed reports, control expenses, and monitor credit card statements and audit logs for each card holder. 
  • POS Ticketing: Users can deliver personalized experiences through group sales, event pre-sales and automated discounts. This feature helps increase ticket sales with dynamic pricing, identify trends and behaviors using integrated analytics, and save time and effort on program management and configuration. It’s possible to convert ticket buyers into members using a 360-degree view of behavior, and layered wealth and demographic information. 
  • Prospect Management: Through custom modeling, users can identify top prospects using likelihood and capacity scores, and prioritize them accordingly. It helps them approach prospects based on their interactions and relationships with other organizations and supporters. Users can also access and use modeling results in CRM and prospect research software. 
  • Direct Marketing Insights: Using direct analytics, users can minimize expenses by eliminating non-essential outbound communication and maximizing marketing communications. Intent-based targeting techniques let users capture untapped donation potential, identify suitable communication channels and determine the best outreach approach. 
  • Modeling and Prospect Research: Prospecting software evaluates data from over 100 compliant data sources using proprietary analytics methods. This generates four key wealth attributes including net worth, annual income, investments and discretionary spend. 
  • Awards Management: Users can enhance cross-functional visibility throughout scholarship and award management processes and create impactful stewardship practices. Students get a unique view of scholarships and can identify suitable plans. It’s possible to share impact with donors by combining fund financial data, key donor data from any CRM, thank you letters and other beneficiary information. 
  • Congregation Management: A connected app lets users manage things like unlimited online donation forms, one-time or recurring giving, member and family profiles, and a comprehensive church directory. It’s also possible to keep congregants informed using a drag-and-drop, intuitive email marketing tool. 
  • Church Management: Users can manage groups effectively using email and text communication, attendance tracking and group leader permissions. Intuitive check-in capabilities help keep children safe and secure, while one-time and recurring events can be managed using event capabilities. Visual tools provide insights into trends. Users can also generate lists and reports, and keep data up to date using built-in data health tools. 
  • Volunteer Management: This feature lets users track general and role-specific requirements for volunteer positions, store background checks and track interest so that they can match an enthusiastic volunteer with appropriate needs. 
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Product Ranking

#5

among all
Nonprofit CRM Software

#28

among all
Nonprofit CRM Software

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User Sentiment Summary

Excellent User Sentiment 2200 reviews
Good User Sentiment 84 reviews
94%
of users recommend this product

Bloomerang has a 'excellent' User Satisfaction Rating of 94% when considering 2200 user reviews from 4 recognized software review sites.

74%
of users recommend this product

Blackbaud CRM has a 'good' User Satisfaction Rating of 74% when considering 84 user reviews from 2 recognized software review sites.

4.7 (18)
n/a
4.7 (749)
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3.71 (42)
4.7 (1273)
3.7 (42)
4.4 (160)
n/a

Awards

Bloomerang stands above the rest by achieving an ‘Excellent’ rating as a User Favorite.

User Favorite Award

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Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews

Reporting: 66% of the users who mentioned reporting said it was very robust and saved a lot of time.
Automation: The platform’s automation eliminates manual tasks, making functionality easier according to 60% of reviews about automation.
Ease of Use: 75% of users who refer to this feature mentioned the software is easy to use and adapt to, even without strong technical know-how.
Integration: 60% of reviews referencing this feature suggested that the platform is easy to operate due to integration with commonly used applications.
Customer Service: 100% of users mentioning this aspect said that they loved the chat support and that the support team helped them understand the product.
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Robust Functionality: Blackbaud CRM is praised for its wide range of features, including donor management, fundraising campaign management, grant tracking, and detailed reporting, making it a comprehensive solution for non-profit needs.
Data Management and Analysis: Users appreciate the software's ability to handle large datasets, generate insightful reports, and provide a comprehensive view of donor interactions, enabling data-driven decision-making.
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Task Management: The platform restricts exporting, generation of data and other functional tasks, with 60% of users who mention this feature observing that data extraction could be simpler.
Customization: 70% of the users who reviewed customization noted that the platform restricts customization of questions for donors, making it difficult to build strategies.
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High Cost: Blackbaud CRM's pricing can be a significant obstacle for smaller nonprofits, potentially diverting funds from their core mission.
Complexity: The software's intricate design can overwhelm users who aren't tech-savvy, leading to a longer learning curve and potential frustration.
Customer Support Concerns: Many users have reported issues with Blackbaud's customer support, citing slow response times and unhelpful interactions, which can be frustrating when needing assistance.
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Bloomerang is a cloud-based solution for small and growing nonprofits that helps organizations view donor records, track the best time to contact each donor and measure donor engagement levels to improve outreach. Strengths include reporting, seamless integration, ease of use and automation. Users also praised the customer support. Some reviewers noted that extracting data isn’t very easy and that survey questions need more customization. However, the system allows unlimited users and is a good product to consider.

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Is Blackbaud CRM the "black sheep" of CRM software, or is it a "baud"acious leader? User reviews from the last year paint a mixed picture of Blackbaud CRM, a comprehensive CRM software designed for nonprofit organizations. While many users, particularly larger organizations, appreciate its robust functionality and in-depth reporting capabilities, which allow for sophisticated data analysis and donor segmentation, others, especially those from smaller nonprofits, find its complexity and high cost prohibitive. For instance, one user lauded Blackbaud's ability to handle large datasets and generate detailed reports, which are essential for tracking fundraising progress and identifying donor trends. However, several users criticized the software's steep learning curve and the need for extensive training to unlock its full potential, making it a daunting prospect for smaller organizations with limited staff and resources. A key differentiating factor of Blackbaud CRM is its specialization in the nonprofit sector, offering features tailored to fundraising, donor management, and grant tracking. This niche focus is a double-edged sword. While it caters to the specific needs of nonprofits, it also means that organizations seeking a more general-purpose CRM might find Blackbaud's feature set overly specialized. Some users praised the software's grant tracking capabilities, highlighting how it streamlined their grant management process and provided a centralized platform for tracking applications and deadlines. However, the recurring theme of high cost and poor customer support left many users feeling frustrated and underserved. In conclusion, Blackbaud CRM is most suitable for large nonprofit organizations with the budget and manpower to invest in training and support. Its comprehensive features, powerful reporting, and industry-specific tools can be invaluable for managing complex fundraising operations and large donor databases. However, smaller nonprofits with limited resources might find its cost, complexity, and customer support lacking. For these organizations, more user-friendly and affordable alternatives might be a better fit.

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